PlanetScale launches Neki, a sharded Postgres that stays real Postgres
PlanetScale has unveiled Neki, a distributed Postgres built from eight years of running massive sharded MySQL clusters. Every shard runs real Postgres with a primary and replicas, while routers parse queries and plan across shards. It handles connection pooling, online schema changes, upgrades, and failovers as built-in workflows. Neki is available in platform preview, not for production, and also runs unsharded for teams not yet ready to shard.
So we built Neki with a few principles, the biggest one being: stick to Postgres, don't work around it, fake it, or turn away from it.
- manlymuppet
I think this will become the new standard.
- gk1
Folks, in your launch posts remember to describe what you're launching and what it's for. Ideally in the opening paragraph.
- Intro: Explains problem but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- Why Neki: Explains alternatives and why they suck but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- How does Neki work: Describes the technical components but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- What you get beyond sharding: Explains how to run/deploy but not what is Neki or what it's for.
- What is a platform preview + Try Neki today: 140 words on the definition of "preview" and links to get started... but not what is Neki or what it's for.
Edit: The landing page has 100x more useful information up front -> https://neki.dev/
Edit #2: They've since added a "What is Neki" section. Good reaction time.
- parthdesai
The tech might be amazing, but the CEO comes across as an asshole
- xyzzy_plugh
I love how the Planetscale CEO has been shitting on multigres[0], Supabase's equivalent to Neki, and gloating about how superior Neki is, and yet Neki is not even open source!
Sam, it feels like you're just playing games. It's hard to take anything you say or do seriously. Are you going to OSS this thing? Or have you decided to backpedal?
Congrats on the checks notes closed launch, I guess?
- Atreiden
The top concern I've gotten from dev teams when proposing HA distributed postgres (e.g through RDS Aurora global) is that eventual consistency is not suitable for many workloads.
Does Neki solve for this, and if so how? My understanding of CAP theorem is that this basically requires some compromises around availability, but I'm curious as to what that looks like in practice here.
- fsuts
Kinda ironic that Planetscale built their company on open source Vitess that google built
And now planetscale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary
- hanspagel
I need this for my side project that has zero users, but I wonder if Neki will scale well enough.
- erulabs
I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well.
Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!